Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

by Ann Beattie

  The Dark Tower is set in the France of the Sun King, and Act I requires two props of Richelieu: “Richelieu hat and gloves under glass dome” and “Picture—Richelieu—on stairs.” World War II is the backdrop for The Glass Menagerie. All have in common families as the dominant social reality, subtexts of unhappiness or even despair, the theme of unrequited love (Dobbin, in Thackeray, is the most remembered character, after Becky herself), as well as the idea of the enterprising woman who takes charge of her own life—or its flip side: the woman or women (The Glass Menagerie) who literally or metaphorically collapse, done in by their frustration.

  As people know, if their older relatives lived through the Depression, that generation learned to live frugally and never forgot doing without; therefore, they do not make long-distance phone calls (except sometimes to report a death) and have a very strange reaction when looking at restaurant menus. Thelma Ryan’s family was poor. Her father died of tuberculosis contracted in the mines. They had barely enough of anything. There was, however, a piano that had come with the farm Mrs. Nixon’s parents bought, and in mentioning her grandmother’s piano playing, Julie Nixon Eisenhower remembers the following song: “The music she most often chose was the plaintive song of the Indian maid Red Wing, who ‘ . . . loved a warrior bold, this shy little maid of old. But brave and gay, he rode one day to battle far away.’”

  Lyrics like these get instilled in children’s minds: the nobility involved, but also the sadness and inevitability of the beloved going off to war. Every girl must identify with Red Wing (unless she is the one doing the leaving—and those song lyrics don’t leap to mind). Mrs. Nixon was left alone by people she loved (who left her by dying). Mr. Nixon left, too, enlisting in World War II and going to the South Pacific, as Red Wing’s warrior departed long before. Our civilization carries countless variations on the theme: every woman was Penelope, every man Ulysses. Women were expected to be strong. Mrs. Nixon, like so many wives, wrote her husband daily and worked for the war effort. She was patriotic, recognizing our flag, rather than the man-in-the-moon face, in the moon, and she could not understand young people who didn’t share her version of patriotism, who marched against the war in Vietnam, who waved signs at the White House urging an end to the war, who wore crazy-looking clothes not because they were poor but because they had enough money to cut holes in their jeans when they didn’t have time to wear out the material, who had enough time to tie-dye T-shirts into smashed kaleidoscopes of color because they didn’t have to do the weekly wash, and to take over universities in their copious spare time.

  Youths’ counterculture never made sense to a lot of people of Mrs. Nixon’s generation. Perhaps if she had reflected on her reading of, and performance in, plays, such rebellious youths would have become more accessible. Becky Sharp fights her way out of society’s expectations, and the women in The Glass Menagerie pay a terrible price for not questioning the prescribed roles of men and women. It might have helped Mrs. Nixon to see Mr. Nixon as a Williamsesque “gentleman caller”; not necessarily reliable, or who he claimed to be, and certainly not a knight in shining armor. When she resisted him initially, it was because she was interested in going against the script and making a life for herself: to act; to travel; to do whatever seemed compelling. Socially, things were beginning to open up a bit—especially because women were needed to go to work during the war—so there was a little less emphasis on marriage and motherhood. Though she had to work, she must still have thought that she had quite a bit of autonomy. Didn’t Becky Sharp and the other women she knew from plays?

  It was to her workplace that Mr. Nixon sent the engagement ring. Instead of her putting it on and dancing in circles, we have Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s report of the gift’s recipient: “For a few seconds, she stared at it blankly. All morning she had anticipated her future husband’s arrival, the unveiling of the ring, the romantic moment when he would put it on her finger. And, now, here it was, in a May basket. Impulsively, she shoved the offering a few inches away from her.” Another teacher is described as entering the classroom: “Look, you are going to put on that ring and right now.” How much did Mrs. Nixon intuit about her future husband by the gesture he made? Did she want more romance (his presence), or merely a more conventional scenario (a personal presentation), or might she have wanted none of it and reacted spontaneously in a very significant way? This possibility is skipped over, as if anyone might have had such a reaction.

  A writer would see such a response as a not-so-subtle gesture that expressed something important about the character. Depending on the story, her actions could be a moment’s faltering, or fear mixed with happiness, or—more interesting—a gesture that is unexpected, even by the character.

  Writers may give the impression that their characters are truly surprised by something, though quite often they’re the ones who are startled into a new consciousness. Flannery O’Connor, whose essays contain some of the most sensible things ever written about writing, says it this way (she is commenting on her story “Good Country People,” in which the character’s wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman): “This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason for this is that it produced a shock for the writer.” Subconsciously, things are working in the writer’s mind as the writer acts as scribe, transcribing events. If something totally unexpected happens in real life, it can’t be revised except in the story that is told about the occurrence. A storyteller can omit things, decide on a different starting point, play things for laughs, or emphasize certain elements of the story to elicit the desired effect. But mostly, since the fiction so many write is already at some distance from the actual, writers retain a superstitious respect for what was somehow told to them, rather than by them.

  In telling Julie the story of receiving the ring, Mrs. Nixon is not writing fiction, exactly, but giving what she thinks of as an honest account of how something happened. She depends upon her daughter’s not asking for clarification (Julie doesn’t), trusting not that the action will speak for itself, but that it will not speak for itself. Leaving us with the words of someone essentially outside the situation is a clever way to deflect attention from the main event. History—time—already informs the person hearing the story: Mrs. Nixon did marry him, so the implication is that her friend gave good advice. But a fiction writer could not include the scene as recounted without realizing that the action of the story abruptly stopped.

  The fiction writer could, quite possibly, think the character’s response to receiving the ring was a much too obvious moment of real, unverbalized feeling asserting itself and try to rewrite the scene to be more subtle. I sometimes find myself in the position of emphasizing things not by raising the volume, but by muting the sound. This is where breaks in the text, such as white space, come in, where asterisks are as frightening as asteroids coming at Planet Earth, where little things retain their size, but gain great weight, in falling.

  What happened in those moments between Mrs. Nixon’s seeing the ring and the friend’s walking into the classroom, seeing the basket, seeing the ring, and putting it on Mrs. Nixon’s finger?

  That’s where we may have our answer, but no one’s talking.

  Questions

  A friend, Radici restaurant, Portsmouth, N.H., June 2007: “Do you identify with Mrs. Nixon?”

  My mother, in the nursing home, 2008: “Are you kidding?”

  Salesclerk, Lyrical Ballad Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., July 2007: “Some Life magazines, huh? Look at that [Tricia Nixon Cox, on the cover, in her bridal dress]! You know, I saw Mrs. Nixon once, in Washington. At the Kennedy Center. She was so thin. (Long pause.) It wasn’t her fault.”

  The Nixons as Paper Dolls

  Tom Tierney has done a number of books of paper dolls. He gives a brief biography of his subjects and draws figures to cut out (“Do not cut out white area between arm and body”). There is a diagram of how to make stands for them. It has fold lines and tabs and measurements. Its construction
is something I could never accomplish, though my husband could make the stand while also drinking coffee, talking on the telephone, painting, and listening to music. Like many writers, I am preoccupied with the horizontal world—reading books—so paper dolls don’t have to be upright for me to enjoy them. Neither do I think the book was really intended as an opportunity to cut out paper dolls. It’s a riff on coloring books and cutouts, aimed at adults. The book is funny because it pretends to be something it isn’t: fun for children. The humor is tongue-in-cheek; it’s a diversion for the audience that involves real, historic figures, deflated and made laughable by their presentation as things a child would play with. It’s the sort of thing Mr. Nixon always feared: being disparaged, somehow diminished, “dissed.” There were plenty of rolled eyes and derogatory terms behind his back, though to his face he remained Mr. President.

  A friend gave me the book of paper dolls long before I thought of writing about Mrs. Nixon. I laughed, flipped through, then put it away and forgot about it. When I was writing this book, I opened a file drawer and there it was, tossed in among the many uncategorizable items; it was probably a sign of mental health not to know how to file them. It has a plaintive quality. No embellishments, the figures as slender as they were in real life, with Mr. Nixon’s slight shoulder slouch well drawn. In a way, we’re always dressing up and dressing down political figures. The press takes note of anything out of the ordinary, whether it be a belt buckle or a slightly different haircut. As a public figure, Mrs. Nixon knew she was being scrutinized, and her response was to scale everything down to make sure her clothes were never worthy of comment: conservative; well pressed; well chosen. She hoped to hide behind her attire, to seem proper and invisible at the same time. This is how she proceeded generally as First Lady. She did things behind the scenes when possible. She did not search out the camera lens like Princess Di. She appeared proper—always proper. She let herself be defined by her acts, whether she was a representative of the United States or simply a housewife visiting schoolchildren. She wanted to be able to do what she did more or less unnoticed. Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most restyled First Hair ever, ultimately indicated insecurity, rather than perfectionism. When you really can’t decide on a post-headband hairstyle, it becomes a problem. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t that way. She opted for protective coloration. She was the generic president’s wife, suited, modestly slipping into sensible shoes, conservatively coiffed. Yet her husband, when asked what he would like for his wife’s birthday, responded: “A walk on the beach, with the breeze in her hair.” He knew that she loved the breeze, representing freedom.

  Since rediscovering my Nixon paper dolls, I’ve made a plan. I imagine a centerpiece on my dining room table: some small vases of summer flowers and a few Nixons standing around: Dick in a “midnight blue” tuxedo; Pat in the blue, ankle-length outfit she wore in Liberia in 1972. The matching blue headdress swirls upward like one of those twirling candles that are thought to be an improvement on simple vertical candles. Flanking the demitasse cup filled with short-stemmed cosmos would be Julie, wearing a knee-length green and white dress with a sash at the waist (green) and edging at the hem (green), along with modest heels (green). This was the dress she wore for her last Christmas in the White House, and it is very neat and proper. Her husband, David, who had been called to duty, wore his naval uniform. He could be standing beside Julie with the saltshaker lined up beside him in a gesture toward military formation. Moving to the pepper grinder—rather formidable in case anyone started to list to starboard—we would see older daughter Tricia (very appropriate, in this context, as Dolly) and Edward Cox. Tricia, a bit in the background (she was reticent about public appearances), would be wearing a pink dress with matching headband and shoes, and her husband would have on the formal morning suit with striped pants that he wore to his wedding. There’s no middle ground for Edward Cox: we get him either in his underpants or in his wedding suit. Alas, there are no paper-doll pets, so neither the poodle nor the Irish setter can be with them.

  Even more amusing might be the depictions of them in their underwear. There are notes on the underwear, informing us that “the President and Mrs. Nixon are shown in underwear typical of the period.” Mr. Tierney seems to have had a bit of editorial fun with the underwear of Edward Cox. He wears “a paisley-patterned knit A-shirt with matching knitted briefs, typical of the ‘Peacock Revolution’ of the sixties when bold patterns and vivid colors became fashionable for men’s undergarments.” A real peacock would blanch. The underwear, in shades of dark purple paisley, suggests fluorescent sperm swimming under a microscope, inside a lavender petri dish. He wears matching dark purple socks.

  Laughing at the Nixons. Haven’t we all done that? The little Nixons in all their sadly recognizable finery, standing around some tabletop, put there by someone who can’t even get it together to buy apples and place them in a bowl for a centerpiece, but who has silver candelabra (inherited) and sterling silver salt dishes (inherited)—a writer who has taken the time to place cutouts of the Nixon family in their underwear amid summer flowers.

  Writers like to do funny things decorating tabletops. You would not see such decorations in Elle Decor. What writer owns an obelisk? No writer I’ve met has any small topiary. They might have a DVD of Edward Scissorhands, but topiary has negative associations because it is so often plunked on tables so you can easily talk around the trunks during tedious fund-raisers. Florists go crazy when told to decorate tables at which writers will sit. It seems to bring out their most frighteningly whimsical thoughts, with icing that spells out the name of the author’s book piped around containers that hold noise blowers, or disposable cameras placed on the tables so the authors can take candid photos as their fellow writers set to serious drinking (who wouldn’t?). In their homes, some writers are rather discreet and have on the table one beautiful object, or candles. Some do have a vase of flowers. But you’ll also find a collection of fifties clip-on earrings in a little Limoges dish, or a geode on a tiny stand, and of course unpaid bills. Poets have stones. Little plastic animals are common, pushed into position sniffing each other’s backsides. Among writers, high seriousness does not preside at table. And as any hostess knows, putting out little things that can be fiddled with (plastic gorilla atop salt dish, elevated to confront miniature pewter water buffalo) makes people feel at ease and breaks the ice. Writers, generally, either are very good cooks or do not cook at all. Little place cards (swiped from Important Occasions: “Mr. DeLillo”; “Ms. Nesbit”) can be oh so merry, though they do not mark the places of people attending.

  The following is a list of other truths about writers, rarely discussed:

  1. They take souvenirs of Important Evenings for their “mother.” This is like taking leftovers home for the “dog.” Of course, some mothers do get the souvenirs and some dogs do get the scraps. However, it is not likely.

  2. If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.

  3. It makes the writer’s day if he or she can include the opinions of a truly stupid character or text in the story, punctuating those announcements with exclamation points, which are the icing on the cake. This situation is to be found in novels, too, but novelists are less likely to be immensely flattered if you have noticed their needle in the haystack(!). For particularly adept and judicious uses of the exclamation point, see the works of Joy Williams and Deborah Eisenberg.

  4. Without these things, many contemporary American short stories would grind to a halt: fluorescent lights; refrigerator
s; mantels. They are its gods, or false gods. In that it is difficult to know Him, these stand-ins are often misspelled.

  5. Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.

  6. Writers are very particular about their writing materials. Even if they work on a computer, they edit with a particular pen (in my case, a pen imprinted BOB ADELMAN); they have legal pads about which they are very particular—size, color—and other things on their desk that they almost never need: scissors; Scotch tape. Few cut up their manuscripts and crawl around the floor anymore, refitting the paragraphs or rearranging chapters, because they can “cut” and “paste” on the computer. As a rule, writers keep either a very clean desktop or a messy one. To some extent, this has to do with whether they’re sentimental.

  7. Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?” An example: stretched-out pajama bottoms imprinted with cowboys on bucking broncos, paired with my husband’s red thermal undershirt (no guilt; he wouldn’t even wear such a thing in Alaska) and a vest leaking tufts of down, with a broken zipper and a rhinestone pin in the shape of pouting lips. Furry socks with embossed Minnie Mouse faces (the eyes having deteriorated in the wash) that clash with all of the above.